Over at Feministing Jessica is under fire for buying her dog from a breeder. I’ve been following the thread since yesterday and was planning to write about it, but it looks like Zuzu beat me to it.
But I’ll add a few things. First, I think it’s important to emphasize the fact that I’m very sympathetic to the animal rights cause. I was a vegetarian for eleven years. As a kid, I wrote letters to Proctor & Gamble protesting their animal-testing policies. I make an effort to buy cruelty-free make-up and other beauty products (although I’m aware that the ingredients used to make those products are often tested on animals, even if the products themselves aren’t). I support stricter animal abuse laws, no-kill shelters, and more regulation of the meat and factory farming industries. My childhood dog (who we got from a friend who had to give him up, not a breeder) was a member of my family, and I still get teary-eyed when I talk about him. I absolutely adore my current dog (who we did get from a private breeder, and who lives in Seattle with my mom), and I desperately want to adopt a dog in New York — but because I know I can’t be a good pet owner right now, I haven’t. I have serious issues with, to borrow Carol Adam’s title, the sexual politics of meat (a book sent to me by fellow animal-lover Hugo). Feminism and animal rights do intersect, particularly in terms of the cultural mythology of meat — that is, the masculization of meat-eating, the feminization of vegetarianism, and the imaging of the female body as meat and a product for consumption. These issues matter, and it’s good to discuss them. But the way we discuss them matters too, and I don’t think that the appropriate place to bring them up is in a thread where a feminist blogger posts a cute video of her puppy. Commenters on that thread argued that the weren’t judging Jessica, but were simply criticizing a choice that Jessica made. But I think we all know it’s not that simple, and that separating the choices people make from the people themselves can be tricky business.
When we’re talking about animal rights, ethics and morals are going to play into the conversation, so I’ll put my animal-related moral code out there so that everyone knows where I’m coming from from the get-go. I believe that human beings have a responsibility to take care of ourselves and other animals to the best of our ability. I do not believe, however, that animals are people, too. We have an obligation to treat non-human animals with kindness, to not abuse them, to not subject them to unnecessary pain and suffering. However, I do believe that humans have greater rights than non-human animals. I don’t think that eating meat is morally wrong; I do, however, thing there are serious moral wrongs happening in the meat industry. I don’t think that having a pet is morally wrong; I do, however, think that there are serious moral wrongs happening in the animal-breeding industry. I can understand the argument against consuming animal products, and I do find meat-eating troubling to an extent, even though I do it. And I can understand the arguments against adopting pets from shelters instead of buying them from breeders, even if I think the way they were thrown at Jessica were really offensive and inappropriate.
What I can’t understand are comments like this:
My assumption: animals are not the property of humans to be bought and sold like slaves for our pleasure. They are other nations, to be respected and treated with dignity. Humans are responsible for cat and dog overpopulation, therefor we are responsible for caring for those animals that need care, the ones in shelters. There is absolutely no need to breed animals for profit, be them for pets or meat. It’s slavery and it’s wrong.
I like Elaine’s writing, and I have a lot of respect for her as a feminist and as a writer. But these kinds of statements, which are too often made by attention-hungry animal-rights groups like PETA (and, notably, by attention-hungry anti-choice groups, only about abortion being a new Holocaust), are offensive on so many levels that I don’t know where to start. Except it only gets worse:
Regarding Zuzu’s comments about slavery: Only people who think their lives are more important than non-human animals’ lives can be offended by the comparison of human slavery to animal slavery. The definition of slavery is to treat another as property. Property is the essential concept of slavery. Property. The only way you can be offended is if you think it’s OK to treat non-human animals as property.
She’s right: It is only offensive when you think that a human life matters more than the life of a cat or a dog or a cow or a fish. I think it does — absolutely, without question. I love my dogs, but I’d pick my sister over them every time. Hell, I’d pick a human stranger over them simply because a human stranger is human, even though I think of my dogs as family and the closest thing that there is to human.
But, just like with anti-choicers who claim that a fertilized egg is the equivalent of a three-year-old child, there’s a major disconnect between the stated view and the practices that follow. Anti-choicers — except for the totally insane ones who are, to their credit, consistent — will always lose with the “how much time should she do?” question, because they’re hesitant to jail or execute women for having abortions, despite the fact that if a fetus is a person, then abortion is the same thing as paying someone to assassinate your child (or at least, they’re hesitant to admit their support for jailing or executing women, because they realize it’s an unpopular position). The animal rights activists who essentially claim that animals are people, too (or that animal lives are morally equivalent to human lives) also suffer from some serious theoretical disconnects. One of the most glaring (and the most feminism-related) is the bodily autonomy right. It’s a core feminist principle, but one that animal rights activists have a difficult time navigating beyond “meat is murder.”
Case in point: Spaying and neutering pets. I’m for it. As the animal rights commenters on the Feministing thread rightly pointed out, there are millions of dogs and cats who are homeless or in shelters. There are simply too many pets who need homes. I don’t know how they all feel about this, but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that the mainstream pro-animal-rights position is in favor of spaying and neutering dogs and cats.
I would be floored if someone suggested that the solution to poverty and homelessness was to sterilize human beings.
Of course, some people have suggested that we sterilize humans without their consent, and some have done it — and we rightly accuse them of moral wrong-doing. Women of color and disabled people have been particularly targeted, and have had their reproductive rights stripped away by people who deem them unfit to produce. But I think feminists today are fairly consistent in the idea that reproductive autonomy is key, and taking away that autonomy is paternalistic and wrong. (I’ll point out here that coercive sterilization practices continue even today — just something for feminists to look out for).
Yet we take bodily autonomy and reproductive rights away from animals because it is, in our opinion, what’s best for them, and for society as a whole. Now, animals can’t speak or communicate their reproductive desires, so perhaps male dogs really do want their balls cut off and female cats never want to have kittens. But we don’t know that. We make that decision for them because they aren’t people. There are people who are unable to communicate their desires because of age or disability or any combination of things — and I suspect that most feminists would oppose measures to sterilize them without their consent, simply because society has decided that it’s “better” to not have any more of those kinds of children. But when we sterilize animals, I would argue that it’s a moral good. The species difference matters. I’m not kept up at night worrying about the violation of bodily integrity that my family has inflicted on our dogs.
There’s a huge difference, of course, between spaying an animal and eating an animal. But my point is that arguments like this are going to back you into a corner. And those PETA ads? Not subversive at all, unless you think Axe ads are also subversive. They’re just racist. And anti-Semitic. And misogynist. And generally hateful, overblown, and thoroughly disgusting. Pro-choicers and feminists have rightly denounced anti-choice campaigns that compare abortion to the Holocaust. I wonder, how does one justify criticism of the anti-choice Holocaust imagery while still supporting the PETA slavery/holocaust ads? Is it ok to co-opt images of the greatest cruelties and the worst of sufferings only so long as you use them in support of a position you agree with?
And so we get back to Jessica and her breeder-born dog. I’m sympathetic to the argument that there are millions of pets who need homes, and buying from a breeder denies those animals a chance at a better life. But I also understand the desire for a particular breed, and the fact that getting a dog from a shelter can be a crapshoot (and yes, getting a dog from a breeder can be a crapshoot too). Sure, they can test the dog for behavioral issues, but the way that the dog behaves in a shelter situation may not be how it behaves once you bring it home. Most reputable shelters will let you bring the dog back if it doesn’t work out, but I can guarantee you that if I had a child in my home, I wouldn’t be bringing dogs home for a test-drive — I’d pick the safest, most gentle-tempered breed available and I’d search that dog’s genetic history for any traces of family aggression and I’d either get it as a puppy so that I could train it myself, or get it as a trained adult from someone I knew and trusted. You don’t take chances with that.
Even in my casual perusal of shelter websites, I have a hard time finding dogs that would fit into my lifestyle. I live in a small New York apartment. I don’t have the time or the ability or the space to let a dog run around a lot. If I were to own a dog, it would have to be very small and it would have to be relatively quiet. It would also have to have short hair, since I have some pet allergies. It would have to be friendly (can’t have it fighting with other dogs in the park) and it would have to be relatively independent and not freak out if I was gone all day. That knocks out a whole lot of shelter dogs right there. Then there are breed-related characteristics that I know would work with my personality and my lifestyle better than others. It’s hard to get that from a shelter dog. Shelters also sometimes have ridiculous rules for adopting their animals. A former room mate of mine ended up going upstate to adopt her cat, because NYC shelters all insisted that she have more space (she lived in a spacious Brooklyn two-bedroom) and that someone be home with the cat all day long. That simply isn’t feasible for a lot of people.
There are also a lot of differences between responsible private breeders and puppy mills.
Which isn’t to discourage shelter adoption — lots of great animals are languishing in shelters, and taking them in instead of getting a designer puppy is very laudable. So is adopting a child, or serving as a foster parent. But it isn’t for everyone, and there are lots of issues to be taken into account.
Which brings me back to feminism. I personally like the idea of adoption. If I have kids, I want to adopt. When I’m older and more settled, I would love to be a foster parent. I don’t think I would ever use IVF, because the whole biological children thing doesn’t appeal to me all that much.
But I understand that there are people to whom it does appeal, and there are people who want very badly to have biological children. There are people who seek out sperm and egg donors according to the donor’s physical appearance, education, religion, personality, and a whole slew of other characteristics. There are people who will invest tens of thousands of dollars into trying to get pregnant. I’ll be very honest when I say that I just don’t get it, but that doesn’t make it wrong, and it doesn’t make my (potential) choice to adopt or foster any more morally righteous than their choice to have biological children. It just means that we have different value systems. There are, of course, ethical lines, but I don’t think they’re drawn between adoption and childbirth, or even adoption and IVF. I don’t think we should sterilize human beings just because there are too many of us in the world already. I don’t think we should make women feel guilty about using reproductive technologies just because there are lots of kids who need foster or adoptive parents.
That’s essentially what’s happening here. In the Feministing thread someone argued that it’s different because humans have a natural urge to reproduce, whereas we don’t have a biological drive to own puppies. I would argue, though, that we do have a very natural urge for companionship and socialization, and pets can provide that. I think it’s wonderful to promote pet adoption (and human adoption, for that matter). But we can do that by talking about our own great experiences with our adopted pets, and with pointing others in the direction of pet-adoption resources. Ragging on someone for buying a pet isn’t effective in any way, shape or form — what, exactly, do commenters expect Jessica to do? And comparing pet ownership to slavery is so beyond the pale that it simply shuts down conversation and makes many of us who are otherwise sympathetic to the animal-rights cause want to run in the other direction.
There’s not much else to say about this except that Monty is f-ing cute, and I can’t wait to get back to NY so that I can meet him in person. And if anyone comes across a black brindle Frenchie (preferably a girl so that I can name her Lily) or a blenheim Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who needs a good home, please send them my way.